Saturday, October 17, 2015

Free textbooks for every student

If you, like me, balk at telling your students that they must pay 126 bucks for an ethics textbook (ethics!), Al Franken is here to help. Franken wants to establish a grant program to fund “open textbooks” -- free, online textbooks that could be distributed openly without restriction.

Co-sponsored by Franken with bill buddy Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, the Affordable College Textbook Act works like this: Higher ed institutions apply for government cash to fund the creation of a shareable book. That otherwise marked-up educational content could be built on or customized by other schools and tweed jacketed academics to suit their courses.It’s unclear how much the book share move would cost Uncle Sam. However, three years ago the University of Illinois spun $150,000 into an open-source book sampled by at least 60,000 students.According to a U.S. PIRG survey, 65 percent of college students have passed on buying a textbook because it was too expensive. On some campuses, books make up more than 40 percent of the cost to attend, says Ethan Senack, a higher education advocate with the consumer group.

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Who we are

Fear and Loathing in Bioethics began life as blog for "Investigative Journalism and Bioethics," a class taught by Amy Snow Landa and Carl Elliott at the University of Minnesota. Although the class has ended, the blog has not. Most posts now are by Carl Elliott, a professor in the Center for Bioethics. However, they do not in any way represent the views or positions of the University of Minnesota.